The NBA, the highest temple of world basketball, has become a worldwide sports organization since 1949, from small to large, from weak to strong, and its influence has grown from several eastern states to the United States, from the United States to the world.

As the most important source of fresh blood in the league every year, the draft meeting in June every year is the most watched event after the finals. At the same time, the draft also marks the start of a new season.

And the rookie training camp before the draft is the Golden Globe Awards before the Oscars, a warm-up before the feast.

Each year, rookie boot camp is held about a month before the start of the draft, mainly in Chicago or Orlando.

In training camp, rookies will undergo physical tests, open training and 5-on-5 simulations, when managers, scouts and even owners of each team will be on hand to watch the performance of these newcomers, and their stats in training camp and their performance in the head-to-head games will greatly affect their position in the draft.

For those super-rookies, they want to get a higher rank with a great performance, which means more fame and more commercial benefits; For the average rookie, they have to perform well in training camp to get drafted in the first round, and a four-year guaranteed contract will be offered by a team. And those who are on the fringes have to do their best in training camp to show off every good they have in order to get into the NBA, even if no one is willing to pick them.

It can be said that the NBA's rookie training camp is the first training session for players before entering the professional circle, and from here on, the team-oriented, youthful and friendly campus basketball will come to an end, and the commercial basketball empire will open its doors to them, and interests, honors, slander and pressure will follow.

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The 2000 NBA Draft will be held in Minnesota at the end of June, and now in early June, less than a month before the draft, this year's draft camp will be held in the eastern city of Chicago.

At around two o'clock in the afternoon, after a working meal, Leon, who was holding a plane ticket to Chicago, left the headquarters building with a notebook, a rollerball pen and a sports backpack issued to him by the Celtics, and Carl told him that each scout was supposed to have a laptop, but in 2000 a laptop was still quite expensive, and for a temporary worker on a three-month contract, the Celtics did not have such equipment for him.

Leon didn't care, he didn't want to run around with an old-fashioned laptop that was thick and heavy like a cement board, and a well-made calfskin cover notebook was more than enough for him.

At the same time, considering Leon's financial situation, Carl also gave Leon a credit card with a limit of $20,000 for travel expenses; Given him a small phone book with the phone numbers of other Celtic staff members who had already arrived in Chicago, Carl told Leon that someone would call him when he arrived in Chicago.

Without exception, Leon turned the phone book on both sides after leaving the headquarters and threw it in the trash, which was a waste of space for him.

After getting into a taxi to the airport, Leon sent a text message to Ms. Khamenez informing her of her current situation and saying goodbye to her home and hoping to contact her back when she returned to Boston.

At this point, Khomeenes should be on her way back to Boston from Marshfield.

Leon also wanted to make a call to Auerbach, but his fingers hesitated on the keyboard for a moment and still didn't press the number, because Leon didn't know what to say to Auerbach, whether to thank him for the job he introduced, or to ask for some details of the scouting job.

In Carl's office, Carl spent nearly two hours detailing Leon's scouting job and the tasks he needed to accomplish during the three months.

Leon mentally reviewed Karl's two-hour introduction, and quickly summed up the scouting work into three parts: first, evaluating a group of geniuses; 2. Selecting the most suitable talent for the team from a group of talents; 3. Discover not-so-ordinary geniuses in a group of relatively ordinary geniuses.

Now, Leon knows that every year in the NBA, teams get more than one draft pick, and a group of rookie basketball players pick the rookies they want in the order in which they want.

Every player who qualifies for the draft is a basketball genius in the broadest sense of the word, an elite figure in all college basketball circles across the country, so it's not a scout's job to find geniuses at all, because everybody knows these guys are geniuses.

Therefore, the core of the scouting work is to describe and evaluate this group of talents with clearer criteria, and to make expectations for their future development, and to provide reference opinions for the team's selection in the draft.

The most difficult items for this work are in the second and third items.

There are always a few players who are the best of geniuses every year, and the team's main job is to count on their luck to get a higher draft pick to select them.

Therefore, in the selection of this level, the most important thing is luck, and the second is how the team management operates in a limited space and with limited chips to win possible signings, and in the process of the draft, through various operations including smoke bombs, robbery, post-draft trades, etc., to pick up the most desired talented newcomers.

The role of scouting here is not outstanding.

And when these players are selected, the test of scouting comes.

In the remaining group of newcomers who look similar but may have a very different future, the team needs to pick a player who is the best fit for the team and has the most potential. This signing, which is usually placed in the middle and back end of the first round, is an option that truly reflects the overall strength of the team's scouting system, and everyone's intelligence and analysis is very important, from the team's general manager to a temporary scout like Leon.

In the second round, which is the third job, to find less ordinary talents in a group of more ordinary talents, this draft pick generally does not appear at the core of the team, but it is often easy to produce some excellent role players, which is a good opportunity for the team to supplement the bench and deepen the depth of the roster.

The draft of this rank is the most test of the strength of scouts, those second-round picks are often not very popular, each player must have more significant flaws, but also have their own advantages, how to clarify the relationship between these flaws and advantages, and focus on future development, it depends on the skills of those scouts.

Leon was thinking about these questions in the taxi, and he didn't notice the phone ringing, so he missed Khomeenez's call.

He picked up his notebook and used his pen to write down many of the new terms he had learned today, such as "Pre-Draft-Camp," "Lottery," "Green-Room," and so on.

It's not that Leon can't remember these things, even if he writes them down in a notebook, it doesn't make sense to carry out his work, he just doesn't want his notebook to be empty, after all, Carl said so many things, there is nothing particularly worth excerpting for him, and he already has a general idea of the job in his head.

But there was so much more to learn about what to do, and Leon only hated not having a "scouting textbook" at hand so that he could learn the subject on the way to Chicago.

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On the other hand, in Chicago, this year's rookie camp is scheduled for June 5, and a week before the official start of the camp, managers, head coaches, scouts, and agents and hired scouts from some agencies have gathered in the city to prepare for the upcoming rookie smash rhamma.

This time, the Celtics' scouting team continues to be led by Rick Pitino, because the previous chief scout Leon Popper has been promoted to the team's player director, so Popper stayed in Boston to compile and sort out the data, and the front-line scouting work was handed over to Pitino and the team's general manager Chris Wallace, as well as the Celtics' assistant coach Jim O'Brien, and video analyst Frank Vogel.

Because Weston Bennett, Pitino's former assistant coach in Kentucky, was hired by Kentucky State University as a head coach in May this year after following Pitino to the Celtics as a senior scout for three years, so the current Celtics team no longer has a full-time scout.

As Pitino envisioned, he wanted to move video analyst Frank Vogel as the team's chief scout, leaving the job of video analyst to Jamil Young alone. But just yesterday he received a call from Michael Carr that the team has hired a new scout who will be reunited with the team in the early hours of the 3rd morning, when they will form a full team to complete the summer mission.

For Paul Gaston and others, who have already moved the idea of selling the team, Auerbach's willingness to recommend a candidate is really good, which means that the red head will begin to re-intervene in the daily affairs of the Celtics, which is conducive to the owners to sell the Celtics, because Auerbach is the old signature of the Celtics.

What's more, Auerbach's recommendation is just an ordinary scouting position, and a profession like scouting is neither important nor important in the NBA, the important thing is that no team can do without them, and the important thing is that anyone on the team can become a scout.

This is not a profession that requires professional and technical titles, but a job that relies heavily on experience, qualifications and connections, and vision and information are the most important, at least in the current NBA, where some teams do not even have full-time scouts, but are held by people in other positions.

The Celtics team stayed at the Chicago Track & Field Hotel, and after receiving Karl's message, Pitino gathered everyone on the team to his room for a brief meeting.

It's been a difficult year for Pitino, not only did his results not improve, but his team was in danger of falling apart.

Assistant coach Jim O'Brien and senior scout Weston Bennett, who just left his job, are old buddies who worked with him during his coaching days at the University of Kentucky, and are now gone.

Andy Anfield, an assistant coach he poached from the Bucks the year before, also chose to leave this year; Frank Vogel and Jamil Young, who were promoted by him and O'Brien, could have become senior scouts to have more authority, but Auerbach directly pushed in a new scout, much to Pitino's displeasure.

After being humiliated at Marshfield on June 1, Pitino left training camp and returned to Boston, never thinking about the possibility of courting Auerbach, and was ready to resign as soon as there were signs of being fired.

Unexpectedly, after the visit on June 1, the voice about Pitino's dismissal in Boston suddenly became much quieter, and it seemed that although Auerbach embarrassed Pitino on the surface, he secretly gave Pitino support, so he could lead the team to Chicago to prepare for the draft with peace of mind.

In the room, O'Brien, Vogel, and Wallace were all present, all of whom had been partners of Pitino's colleagues for many years, and the relationship was close and close, and Pitino didn't talk much nonsense, and told everyone the news from Boston.

"Do you know who he is?" Wallace asked, who was the number two other than Pitino.

"No, I don't know, Carl didn't reveal this person's personal information, just said he would be there tonight." Pitino replied with a shake of his head.

"What is this? Mixed with sand? Vogel said bluntly and bluntly.

"Maybe, I'd like to see what kind of sand it is." Jim O'Brien finally added that he spoke to everyone in the room, and everyone was curious about who this new scout was.